As Mayor Eric Adams tackles soaring felony crime, up 28% compared with 2019, he does so in an environment that didn’t exist in the 1980s or even the 1990s: one in which we have a greater awareness of the prevalence of mental illness among both suspects and victims and the need to address such ailments to prevent aggression in the first place.
It’s good that New York wants to explore preventing crime through public health rather than respond after the fact. But the city has to entirely redesign the “performance metrics,” as the consultants like to say, of its mental-health services, to see if what we’re doing is working.
The city’s main way of judging its own performance through data is the annual “mayor’s management report.” This year’s 506-page document contains data-based “outcomes” on everything from picking up the trash to teaching kids to read.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post